Nurses' and students' perception of risk from medical practices

Objectives: To determine the risk perceptions of a series of medical practices in non-expert (un-dergraduates) and expert (nurses) samples.Methods: Four hundred and forty-seven nurses and 246 undergraduate students participated in this study. They all answered questionnaires about the risk dimensions and acceptance for medical practices. Results: An exploratory factor analysis on participants' answers to various dimensions of risk yielded a two-factor structure for risk perception in both samples: for nurses, the factors were"Unknown"and"Dread,"while for students, they were"Dread"and"Lack of Independence."For both nurses and stu-dents, the factor scores of Dread negatively related to individual risk acceptance of medical practices. Furthermore, nurses tended to be more accepting of practices that they knew well (i.e., low Unknown scale scores). For students, the subscale scores of the Lack of Independence factor negatively related to individual risk acceptance only for health examination practices. Nurses conceived risks more correctly and concretely compared to students. This was especially pronounced for practices related to medication use. Conclusions: Although both nurses and students conceived various risk contents from medical practices, their conceptions still differed. Knowledge of these differences in the structure of risk perception and conceived risk contents of various medical practices between nurses and students could be utilized to improve risk communication in clinical practice.

Study of risk acceptance criteria for dams

This paper discusses the methods of establishing risk criteria for dams and reviews the application of dam risk criteria for individuals and societies in different countries or districts. Given the conditions in China and considering the public safety and acceptance of dam risk, historical dam break data and current design standards, individual and societal risk criteria for dams are proposed. The tolerable dam risk criteria for individuals should be set to 10-5-10-7 per annum based on project scale, for ex- ample, approximately 1.0xl0 7 per annum, which corresponds to a reliability index of 4.2 based on a 100-year lifespan for a first-class or large project. The societal limit for risk tolerance for dams should be set to approximately 10-3-10-5 per annum, corresponding to the fatality range from 1 to 100 and be horizontally extended to 1000, and F-N curves are proposed. It was also found that the reliability indices of Chinese Standard （GB 50199-2013） and Eurocodel （2002） are different, but they have the same level of safety measured by the annual probability of failure. The research results have significance for establishing dam risk criteria.

Lower and upper pricing of financial assets

Modeling of uncertainty by probability errs by ignoring the uncertainty in probability.When financial valuation recognizes the uncertainty of probability,the best the market may offer is a two price framework of a lower and upper valuation.The martingale theory of asset prices is then replaced by the theory of nonlinear martingales.When dealing with pure jump compensators describing probability,the uncertainty in probability is captured by introducing parametric measure distortions.The two price framework then alters asset pricing theory by requiring two required return equations,one each for the lower upper valuation.Proxying lower and upper valuations by daily lows and highs,the paper delivers the first empirical study of nonlinear martingales via the modeling and simultaneous estimation of the two required return equations.